About this blog.

This blog is a forum for disseminating the science, culture, and life of the Broad Institute. Reflecting the unique, collaborative community that is the Broad, you have the opportunity to hear from – and respond to – a variety of contributors. Click here to read our Community Guidelines.

Archives

Categories

Blog

In the last talk of this year’s Midsummer Nights’ Science series, Broad research scientist Jessica Alföldi will discuss the history of the enigmatic coelacanth and what its genome has taught us about our own evolution.

It’s one of the great quandaries of the Information Age: as advances in digital technologies allow us to generate data at an ever-increasing pace, there is a concomitant need to find new ways to process and analyze the resulting deluge of information.

Midsummer Nights’ Science continues next week with the “Unweaving the circuitry of human disease,” the third lecture in this year’s series. Broad associate member Manolis Kellis will be speaking at the July 24 event, discussing current efforts to build high-resolution activity maps of gene and regulatory regions across hundreds of cell types. These maps are bringing the genome to life, revealing possible culprits in human disease, and exposing the circuitry likely responsible when the genome’s regulatory system goes wrong.

Dawn Thompson has spent much of her career studying yeast. The experimental biologist, who is assistant director of the Broad’s Cell Circuits Program, and group leader in core member Aviv Regev’s lab says that she fell into the field “by accident.” While interviewing for her first post-college research position, she happened to hit it off with a yeast geneticist. After working in that lab, she went on to graduate school.

The storybook character Peter Pan may have escaped the fate, but in the real world growing up is inevitable. Biologically speaking, the turn to adulthood happens in humans when the brain tells the pituitary glands to start producing hormones, jump-starting puberty. This typically happens around age 10 in girls and 11 in boys. But, for a small percentage of children, the process can start much earlier. If the brain initiates the process before age 8 in girls or 9 in boys, the child experiences central precocious (or “early”) puberty.

Rameen Beroukhim realized early in his medical training that he wanted to be an oncologist.

“In medical school, I had the opportunity to work with patients who had cancer,” he explains. “I was struck by how vibrant – and how essentially healthy – many of these patients were, despite the fact that they were contending with such a challenging disease.”

Perhaps no one has a more complete picture of a disease than a physician-scientist does. Take Adam Bass, who this week published, with his co-authors, a study on the genome sequence of esophageal adenocarcinoma (EAC), a deadly cancer that starts in the lower esophagus: as a physician, Bass has cared for patients afflicted with EAC, and has seen its devastating effects. As a research scientist, Bass has also seen the inner workings of the disease, and is hunting for its vulnerabilities.

Prick your finger with a pin, and you’re likely to have a reflexive response – possibly blood, a jerk of the hand, and an anguished cry. Penetrate the skin with a finer tool, however, such as an acupuncture needle or a mosquito’s proboscis, and the reaction – if there is one – might not be as immediate or severe; the piercing invader is simply too slight to notice.

Consider the classic "message in a bottle" scenario: a man is stranded on an uncharted landmass far from civilization. Thanks to his watertight missive, he is able to let others know that he's out there — that the landmass on which he is marooned exists somewhere in the world. However, without any reference points, his exact location remains a mystery.